My Research

My academic interests fall at the confluence of non-Cartesian cognitive science, philosophy of mind and cognition, philosophy of perception, philosophy of science/biology, cultural psychology, developmental neuroscience, and evolutionary biology. Specifically, my research to date falls into six main areas, all of live interest in philosophy of science, mind, and cognition:

In my PhD thesis (passed with no corrections on 5 November 2015: certificate formally awarded on February 25, 2016), entitled “Plasticity, Learning, and Cognition: an integrative approach to sensory substitution devices and embodied, enculturated skills”, I developed a novel theoretical framework for the study and integration of plasticity, learning, and cognition. I took sensory substitution devices (SSDs), which allow blind people to experience sensory inputs by transforming images into tactile or auditory stimuli, as my paradigmatic case studies. I investigated the capacity of our brains to functionally and anatomically change following SSD usage and looked at how training with an SSD can lead to increasingly proceduralized skills and expertise.

SSDs aim to replace the functions of an impaired sensory modality (e.g., sight) by providing its user the environmental information normally gathered by another sensory modality (e.g., touch or audition). In collaboration with Professor Andy Clark (Edinburgh) and Associate Professor Julian Kiverstein (Amsterdam), we argued that persistent SSD usage delivers a new mode of perception that is not reducible to that of any single existing sense or any combinations of existing senses. Instead, under certain circumstances a given cortical brain region – e.g., sensory cortex – can exhibit functional plasticity and support novel perceptual processing irrespective of the nature of the sensory inputs that are being sent to it (Kiverstein et al. 2013, Oxford University Press).

This research led me to explore links between SSD usage and synaesthesia. Synaesthesia is commonly defined as a condition in which stimulation in one sensory or cognitive pathway leads to associated experiences in a second, unstimulated pathway. For example, in grapheme-colour synaesthesia individual letters of the alphabet or numbers are experienced as having distinctive or specific colours. I argued that intensive SSD usage can lead to an artificially-induced form of synaesthesia (Farina 2013, Biology and Philosophy). This work revealed the exciting possibility of studying non-developmental forms of the condition including whether synaesthesia may be induced by posthypnotic suggestion or hallucination.

Professor Brian Keeley (Pitzer College), one of the examiners of my dissertation, wrote: “…I very much like how Mr Farina explores the idea that SSDs don’t necessarily give their users a neurotypical sense, but instead may give their users a completely novel sense (or perhaps should be considered to experience artificially-induced synaesthesia). This, to my knowledge, is an entirely new way of thinking about what SSDs mean within the philosophy of perception”.

In subsequent work in collaboration with Malika Auvray (EHESS, Paris), we further refined my original model and investigated conceptually whether these non-developmental forms of synaesthesia could be counted as genuine expressions of the condition (Auvray & Farina, in press, Oxford University Press). This collaboration has brought new precision to my original proposal and has opened up new vistas for empirical and theoretical research, which I would keenly like to pursue in my postdoc.

My attention to the nature of plasticity and learning in the specific context of sensory substitution has then led to broader insights about the nature of learning in humans, with a paper in the British Journal for the Philosophy of Science (Farina 2014). In this paper I proposed an original and synthetic alternative framework (neo-neuroconstructivism) to account for the role of plasticity in development. This framework overcomes difficulties of a previous-unresolved stand-off in the literature and incorporates recent neuroscientific work on the plasticity of brain and cognition. Specifically, it describes cortical specialisation as heavily dependent on culture-sensitive activities throughout the entire lifespan and puts forth the idea that the activities that do the neuro-constructing, at every stage of life, themselves have a cultural source.

This framework is a promising new approach to understanding human learning processes throughout the lifetime. It has important consequences for understanding how human agents engage in cultural learning and how this, in turn, influences, human social and cultural evolution. Neo-neuroconstructivism thus has the potential to clarify what has led to the exceptionalism of human societies.

Distinguished Professor Peter Godfrey-Smith (CUNY/Sydney), an examiner of my dissertation, wrote: “Farina has a knack for saying enough to be interesting and substantial without exaggerating, going too far, or launching out on onto pointless limbs in order to be dramatic. There is a sense of balance all through this chapter (through the whole work, in fact), and that is admirable”.

In my postdoc, among other things, I propose to use this framework as a stepping stone for a new theory of cultural learning, which innovatively merges scientific work on the psychological mechanisms of learning with explorations of the historical contexts supporting the functions performed by such mechanisms. Influenced by new models of the evolution of human cognition, developed, most notably, by Professor Cecilia Heyes (Oxford), Professor Tim Lewens (Cambridge), Professor Kim Sterelny (ANU), and Professor Michael Tomasello (Leipzig), I aim to add extra detailed attention to the historical specificities of the varieties of cultural learning observed in humans.

My new model thus elucidates how cultural learning occurs in our species, by integrating accounts that have been traditionally formulated in separate fields, namely: (1) a historical analysis (Wimsatt 2013, MIT Press; Yasnitsky 2014, Cambridge University Press) of the properties of cultural phenomena and cultural agents (such as context-specificity, scaffolded structure, and transmissibility); and (2) a psychological and epistemological account of the core mechanisms involved in cultural learning (such as imitation, instruction, and cooperation joint action).

I argue that many learnable cultural contents can only be adequately described by an ontology that identifies the context-specific character of learnable skills (Hacking 2002, Harvard University Press) and propose an innovative interpretation of the relations between the psychological mechanisms (imitation, instruction, cooperative joint action) that allow for cultural evolution, reflecting on its epistemic value. Specifically, I produce an account of how learning affects the functioning of these mechanisms, how they work, and they are constituted. I claim that many of those mechanisms are themselves cultural inherited, that is largely acquired through social interaction in the course of ontogeny. I argue that the evolution of cooperative tendencies (which enabled large-scale social interactions) might have given rise to contexts in which cultural learning practices (such as imitation or instruction) could evolve culturally, thereby forming the basis of the cultural evolution of a (culturally diverse) range of impressive and unique set of human skills, artefacts, institutions and lifeways.

I already have laid the groundwork for success in this project through collaborations with leading scholars at Macquarie University (such as Dr Karola Stotz, and Dr Nicolas Bullot). As a Research Assistant for Dr Karola Stotz I am involved in a research project investigating information-processing in gene regulatory networks. Together with Dr Nicolas Bullot I co-authored a paper ‘A Psychohistorical Account of Cultural and Artistic Learning’, which is almost ready for submission to Philosophy of Science. I also edited (invited by Professor Duncan Pritchard FRSE) the entry [accepted May 2016] ‘Culture and Cognition’ for the Oxford Bibliographies Online.

In parallel to my new model of cultural learning I am developing an original taxonomy of the various distinctive forms of developmental (phenotypic) ‘plasticity’ [neural, cognitive, and cultural], which play a diverse array of roles in philosophy and the cognitive sciences: I separate the distinctive timescales and mechanisms by which different forms of plasticity are thought to operate in human learning, so that the key questions about how these distinct forms of plasticity interact can then be raised.

Professor Michael Anderson (Franklin & Marshall College), an examiner of my dissertation, wrote: Mr Farina’s work shows a nose for interesting philosophical issues, and even more so for underappreciated and understudied topics. I think this is exemplified not just in his careful and through examination of the perceptual phenomenology of synaesthesia, and its potential relevance to sensory substitution devices, but also and perhaps even more by the as yet unpublished chapter on the taxonomy of plasticity. Such work is both excellent, and necessary to continued progress in the philosophy of neuroscience. We are only just scratching the surface in understanding the importance of ongoing dynamics to mind and behavior and I expect this contribution to provide the foundation for important future explorations of the increasingly central notion of plasticity in the cognitive science”.

My attention to the nature of learning in humans has then led me to explore the characters of skills and the origin of talent, with a chapter (accepted February 2016) in the MIT Handbook of Embodied Cognition and Sport Psychology edited by A/Prof Massimiliano Cappuccio (UAE). In this chapter, which I co-authored (as a first author) with Prof Alberto Cei (a leading Italian sport psychologist based in Rome), we proposed an embodied and multidimensional model of talent and expertise. This model integrates genetic and environmentalist research in the attempt to solve to the long standing research question of whether talent is born or made.

In addition to my research on sensory substitution, synaesthesia, cultural learning/evolution of cognition, embodied skills and talent, I am also working (with Prof Jan Lauwereyns, Fukuoka) on another project, which addresses the role of predictive coding in perception and art. In this project I apply some appropriate caution – on independent theoretical and empirical grounds – to recent suggestions that the currently-popular ‘predictive coding’ framework in cognitive neuroscience can be directly applied to traditional problems about the origin and nature of aesthetic appreciation and artistic cognition.

Finally, I am collaborating with leading hypnosis scholars (such as Professor Amanda Barnier [Macquarie], Professor Etzel Cardena [Lund], and Dr Devin Terhune [Goldsmiths]) on a large scale 3-year (Macquarie-based) project of cognitive and other correlates of hypnotisability, which will lead to several high-profile publications. This project will aim to refine the component based model of hypnotisability that Professor Barnier and Professor Woody (Waterloo) developed (2005,Psychological Assessment), by laying the groundwork for a longitudinal, developmental approach that will identify trajectories of hypnotisability and associated abilities over time.

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